The Chronicle: Faculty Union Calls on U. at Buffalo to Cut Ties to Chambers of Commerce
Opening a new front in the conflict between college labor unions and conservative advocacy groups, the University at Buffalo’s faculty union has resolved to pressure the institution to sever its ties with state and local chambers of commerce.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged U of Buffalo, Unions
New Politics: Teacher Unionism Reborn
By Lois Weiner
In the past five years, we have witnessed a demonization of teachers unions that is close to achieving its goal: destruction of the most stable and potentially powerful defender of mass public education. Teacher unionism’s continued existence is imperiled — if what we define as “existence” is organizations having the legal capacity to bargain over any meaningful economic benefits and defend teachers’ rights to exercise professional judgment about what to teach and how to do it.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WAKE UP, NLRB! CHICAGO GRAD STUDENT EMPLOYEES RALLY
TO WAKE THE NLRB FROM ITS COMA,
HELP IT RECOGNIZE THAT GRAD LABOR COUNTS!
Chicago, IL, December 13, 2011 — Today at noon, Chicago-area graduate students and their supporters will demonstrate outside the Chicago branch office of the National Labor Relations Board (209 S. LaSalle St.) and present a petition calling on the NLRB to wake from its coma of inaction and recognize private university graduate student teaching and research assistants as employees with a legal right to unionize and collectively bargain.
The rally, organized by Graduate Students United, the graduate employee union at the University of Chicago, and the national Grad Labor Counts! campaign, will feature a dramatic skit in which the NLRB is presented as a comatose hospital patient to reflect its record of inaction and danger of imminent demise. The Grad Labor Counts! campaign has been endorsed by the 1.4 million-strong American Federation of Teachers and the 70,000-member American Association of University Professors.
“We’re calling for for urgent medical attention to the ailing patient from President Obama and Congress, who have the power to restore the NLRB by appointing a new member in 2012,” explained Dasha Polzik, a member of Graduate Students United and an organizer of the Grad Labor Counts! campaign.
“We’re also calling on the NLRB to wake from its coma and issue a ruling on a case that has sat before it since April 2010 concerning the employee status of graduate students at private universities,” added Greg Goodman, another GSU member. Graduate student teaching and research assistants were first recognized as employees by a unanimous NLRB ruling in 2000, and then stripped of their employee status by a later Bush-era ruling in 2004.
Representatives from Grad Labor Counts! will deliver a petition with over 2,700 signatures from across the country calling on the NLRB to rule on the case and recognize graduate student teaching and research assistants at private universities as employees. Details on the Grad Labor Counts! campaign and petition are available at http://gradlaborcounts.org.
Graduate Students United (AFT-AAUP) at the University of Chicago
http://uchicagogsu.org
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Tagged Chicago, Graduate student labor, NLRB, Students, U of Chicago, Unions
The Chronicle: State Attorney General Seeks to Thwart Union for U. of Michigan Graduate Researchers
Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, is seeking to intervene in proceedings before that state’s Employment Relations Commission to try to get it to block graduate-student research assistants at the University of Michigan from unionizing. In a motion submitted to the commission on Wednesday, Mr. Schuette argues that the case “involves matters of significant public interest” because the unionization of the university’s graduate research assistants “has the potential to significantly damage” its reputation as a research institution. Leaders of the union drive responded by issuing a statement arguing that graduate researchers have a right to decide whether to unionize without outside interference. When the commission meets on December 13, it is expected to vote on asking an administrative-law judge to conduct a faculty inquiry into whether the university’s graduate-student research assistants should be thought of as employees eligible for unionization, or simply considered as students.
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Posted in Organizing, Students, Unions
Tagged Organizing, Students, U of Michigan, Unions
The Chronicle: Unions Confront the Fault Lines Between Adjuncts and Full-Timers
Some look beyond the big unions for real improvement in working conditions
The largest organizers of college faculty unions—the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association—have made big strides in recruiting adjunct instructors and helping them gain representation through collective bargaining.
But the three groups have a long way to go before their membership and their leadership reflect the dominant role that adjunct instructors play in the higher-education work force, a Chronicle survey of the organizations reveals. Such instructors now account for about two-thirds of all faculty members employed by public and private colleges.
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Posted in Contingent labor, Unions, Working conditions
The Guardian: Day of strikes as millions heed unions’ call to fight pension cuts
• Disruption across UK as many services come to virtual halt
• Airports, schools, rail services and hospitals affected
• Reform of public sector pensions is at heart of dispute
The UK is experiencing the worst disruption to services in decades as more than 2 million public sector workers stage a nationwide strike, closing schools and bringing councils and hospitals to a virtual standstill.
The strike by more than 30 unions over cuts to public sector pensions started at midnight, leading to the closure of most state schools; cancellation of refuse collections; rail service and tunnel closures; the postponement of thousands of non-emergency hospital operations; and possible delays at airports and ferry terminals.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes, Unions
Tagged pension cuts, Strikes, UK
The Chronicle: Prominent Advocate for Adjunct Faculty Clashes Again With Union Leaders
Jack Longmate, a part-time English instructor who drew national attention this year by clashing with the National Education Association and its Olympic College affiliate over their representation of adjunct faculty, is once again at odds with union leaders.
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Posted in Contingent labor, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, NEA, Olympic College, Washington
The Chronicle: Ohio Voters Reject Law to Curtail Public-College Faculty Bargaining Rights
Ohio voters rejected a controversial anti-union measure Tuesday, with a strong majority voting no in a referendum on whether to approve a new state law that would have limited collective-bargaining rights for public employees and severed many public-college professors from the bargaining process.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Ohio
The Chronicle: Faculty Unions in Ohio and Wisconsin Hunker Down
Political climate forces leaders to accept concessions and defeat
The attacks on Ohio’s and Wisconsin’s public-sector unions mounted by fiscally conservative lawmakers this year are forcing unions that represent public-college faculty in those states to rethink their strategies and basic missions.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Unions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Unions
BBC: At least 12,000 schools hit by teachers’ pension strike
Teachers and lecturers make up the bulk of those protesting
Continue reading the main story
Hundreds of thousands of pupils across England and Wales have missed lessons as teachers staged a one-day strike over changes to their pensions.
At least 12,000 schools are known to have been closed or partly closed. Unions say the total is even higher.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Neoliberalism, Strikes & Labor Disputes, UK
UK teachers strike over attacks on pensions.
Details at:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5616
Strikes will take place in schools, further education colleges and universities. This is action across the UK education sector on an unprecedented scale.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes, Unions
Tagged pensions, Strikes & Labor Disputes, teachers, UK
The Chronicle: NLRB Proposes Speeding Up Unionization Votes at Private Colleges
Employees of private colleges would find it easier to vote on forming unions under rules changes proposed by the National Labor Relations Board and scheduled for publication in Wednesday’s Federal Register. Among other changes, the proposals would allow for the electronic filing of election petitions, establish standardized time frames for the resolution or litigation of election-related disputes, defer litigation over most voter-eligibility issues until after elections, and consolidate all election-related appeals to the board into a single post-election appeals process, according to an NLRB news release. The proposed revisions are expected to meet opposition from many private-sector employers that fall under the board’s purview and have complained that speeding up elections would leave them too little time to mount effective anti-unionization campaigns and would otherwise stack the deck against them.
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Posted in Organizing, Unions
Tagged NLRB, Organizing, Private colleges, Unions
Journal Sentinel: Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law
Madison – Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial plan to end most collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.
The court found that a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily approved the collective bargaining measure in March and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had halted the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Legal issues, Wisconsin
The Chronicle: Union Arm of AAUP Blasts Its Handling of Key Executive Changes
The American Association of University Professors’ umbrella organization for unionized local affiliates has adopted a resolution condemning how the group’s leadership went about ousting the AAUP’s general secretary, Gary Rhoades, and protesting that the AAUP’s executive committee and its president, Cary Nelson, are usurping the powers of its national leadership council.
The resolution, overwhelmingly passed by the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress late Thursday during the organization’s annual conference here, also condemns how Mr. Nelson has gone about handling the process of replacing the director of the AAUP’s department of organizing and services following a decision by the staff member in that position, Mike Mauer, to step down. Mr. Nelson defied the wishes of the leadership of the Collective Bargaining Congress in appointing a staff member to the search committee that he established to fill the position.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged AAUP, Cary Nelson, Gary Rhoads, Unions
The Chronicle: AAUP President Urges Faculty to Join Battle Against Unwarranted Cuts
Washington
The president of the American Association of University Professors painted a bleak picture of higher education in his remarks that opened the association’s annual meeting here on Wednesday.
“The last eight to 10 months has been like nothing that I’ve ever experienced before,” said Cary Nelson, the association’s president, who has been a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1970.
In a speech that highlighted recent attacks on collective-bargaining rights, academic freedom, and tenure, Mr. Nelson chastised faculty members who refuse to acknowledge that the nation’s higher-education system is broken. He said his own predictions over the years about the shifting higher-education landscape turned out not to be bleak enough.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Unions
Tagged AAUP, Budgets & Funding, Unions
The Chronicle: Labor Board Rejects Religious Exemption for Saint Xavier U. and Says Adjuncts Can Unionize
A regional official of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Saint Xavier University, a Roman Catholic institution in Illinois, is not sufficiently religious to fall outside that agency’s jurisdiction, and has cleared the way for the institution’s roughly 240 adjunct faculty members to hold a unionization vote.
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Posted in Legal issues, Organizing, Unions
Tagged adjuncts, NLRB, Organizing, Saint Xavier U, Unions
FACE: Faculty at the University of Illinois-Chicago Say “Union Yes!”
HUNDREDS OF FACULTY DEMAND RIGHTS, AUTHORIZATION CARDS BEING DELIVERED TO ILLINOIS EDUCATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD TODAY
Chicago, IL – Representatives from the UIC United Faculty campaign today will deliver hundreds of signed authorization cards to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB,) marking the first time in Illinois history that a large public research university’s faculty have organized a union. The broad and diverse coalition of faculty from across various academic spectrums formed and led the UIC United Faculty campaign in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT,) the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
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Posted in Organizing, Unions
The Chronicle: Connecticut Measure Would Strip Many Faculty Members of Collective-Bargaining Rights
A budget bill working its way through Connecticut’s House of Representatives would have the effect of stripping many college faculty members of their rights to engage in collective bargaining, by reclassifying them as “managerial employees” if they are heads of academic departments or hold certain other decision-making roles.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged Collective bargaining, Connecticut, Unions
The Chronicle: AAUP Appears Ready to Part Ways With Gary Rhoades, Its General Secretary
After three years as general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, Gary Rhoades may be on his way out, the casualty of personality clashes between him and the organization’s longtime president—Cary Nelson—and its staff members in Washington, according to AAUP sources familiar with the disputes.
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Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others
Commentary
The Chronicle: Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others
By Keith Hoeller and Jack Longmate
Do tenure-track and adjunct faculty belong in the same union? A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that tenure-track faculty are “managerial employees” and not entitled to unions in the private sector. But in public-sector unions, tenured professors are often combined with contingent faculty, who are certainly not “managerial.” Tenure-stream faculty supervise the adjuncts, determining workload, interviewing, hiring, evaluating, and deciding whether to rehire them. Gregory Saltzman observed in the National Education Association’s “2000 Almanac of Higher Education” that combined units may not be ideal because of the “conflicts of interests between these two groups.”
In fact, the unequal treatment of professors by their unions has come to resemble the plot of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm.
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Posted in Unions
Tagged adjuncts, AFT, Commentary, Contingent labor, NEA, tenure-stream faculty, Unions, Vancouver, Vancouver Community College, Washington